Soda Craze

Oh, happy Year of the Pig, by the way! But what I was actually referring to was a planet.

I always had a certain contempt for Pluto - an awful, erratic ball of icy rock orbited by another wee crappy spheroid for a moon. I mean, Pluto and Charon? How morbid. What a cheap little pair of two-bit wannabes. And I meanly rejoiced when I heard last year that Pluto wasn’t going to be considered a planet any more (though that does screw up that My Very Elegant Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas mnemonic - perhaps we can come up with a new one?). Yeah, it’s called like 134340 now, like a prisoner’s bar code. I thought: You sort of deserve that. For being so small-time. Don’t you ever want to make something of yourself?

But then I happened to acquire the BBC’s ‘The Planets’ documentary series (1999) and the first episode changed my mind, even softened my heart. Because Pluto? was interesting to begin with, the toying with Neptune’s orbit and the tedious search for that single irregularity: “Doctor Slipher, I have found your Planet X.” The story of the name and everything, that little girl who read the Greek mythology.
And then, in this documentary, they point out that beyond the Ice Giants (Uranus and Neptune) the well-accepted Accretion Theory of planet formation becomes weaker, the computer simulations misfire and don’t produce planets. So little Pluto is an anomaly too.

In 1992, though, ice was found beyond Neptune in a band that was eventually named the Kuiper Belt, which is ‘thought to be the building blocks of ice giants that never were.’ Some of the experts (rather excitingly) think that this is actually where the solar system began to accrete, rather than finish the job - and why the job got shut off when it did. Yeah, and Pluto is at the inner edge of this belt, which means (they think) that you can explain Pluto’s odd orbit and placement outside the accretion disk by its birth order: the first in our solar system, that escaped being swallowed by another planet or swung out of the gravitational pull of the sun. It’s like the great ancestor of the rest of the planets in the system.

So now that we all have to give Pluto a little respect (despite that demotion from planet status), NASA sent the New Horizons probe in 2006 (ETA July 2015) to go take a peek at this survivor, this strange shrivelled grandfather, and its moon. Too cool. No? No, I think it’s cool. If I hadn’t gone for the life sciences I would have been all over space exploration like white on rice. Incidentally, if you can get your hands on this BBC series, do it - I honestly can’t recommend it highly enough. Absolutely fascinating, very well-made. Oh, and by the way, if you’re still reading this you’re probably a lapsed SodaCrazy: log in and post something!